The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Well, jeez,” Pinky says. “He’s in Bangkok.” To Rafferty he says, “So how do you like him?”

  Poke says, “I’d like him better if he came with a remote. When he looked at that nine-pound watch, I saw something yellow, a tattoo, on his wrist. Anybody know what it is?”

  “It’s that rattlesnake,” the Growing Younger Man says, “although I don’t know why it’s yellow. From the Gadsden flag?”

  “Which flag?” Hofstedler asks. Hofstedler has an interest in flags that Rafferty privately classifies as Germanic.

  “Gadsden. From just before the Revolutionary War. Bright yellow, the coiled rattler that said ‘Don’t tread on me.’”

  “That’s making a comeback,” Rafferty says. “Lot of people on the American right are flashing it around, as though the liberals are coming after their country-club memberships and incandescent bulbs.”

  “They are,” says Campeau, who hasn’t set foot in America in forty years.

  Pinky Holland says over him, to Rafferty, “First time he was in here, he asked about you, you know.”

  Rafferty regards Holland for a few seconds. “No,” he says. “In fact, I didn’t know.” He turns to Hofstedler, the Repository of All Knowledge in the Expat Bar.

  “He didn’t,” Hofstedler says. “Pinky leaps to his conclusion yet again. About travel writers he was talking, asking who wrote best about Bangkok.”

  “And who does?” Rafferty says.

  Campeau says, “Christopher G. Moore.”

  “Those aren’t travel books, they’re mysteries. Was that it? He asked, and that was the answer?”

  “No,” the Growing Younger Man says. He pulls the straw from his drink and licks a formless clot of powdered blue-green algae off its tip while everyone looks elsewhere. “We said, you know, about Chris Moore’s books, and then the guys named half a dozen other writers, and then someone thought of you.”

  “No prophet is honored in his own land,” Rafferty says. “It didn’t occur to you, Leon—it didn’t occur to any of you—to mention this to me?”

  “He has always been here when you were here, yes? So who could tell you about it?” Hofstedler pulls his stein back across the bar and studies the level of the beer, probably comparing it to ten or twelve thousand others. “And he did not exactly leap to his feet when your name was finally mentioned.”

  Pinky says, “Toots, I’m going to stay where I am and drip for a minute. Can I get a double?”

  “Jack Daniel’s or Crown Royal?” Toots says.

  “Oh, come on,” Pinky says. “Everybody knows they’re all really Mekong.”

  “Jack, then,” Toots says. “More cheaper.”

  “You know,” Rafferty says, “I don’t remember anyone calling me by name in here during the past few days.”

  Hofstedler takes a sip, looking like he expects to find an insect floating in the suds, and says, “But why would we? We know who you are.”

  “But tonight your Arthur Varney called me a travel writer, which means he knows what my name is,” Poke says, pushing his stool back into position against the bar. “I think that’s kind of interesting.” He pulls a baseball cap out of his pocket and slaps it open on his jeans. “Would you drip a little to your left, Pinky? I’m on my way out.”

  “Gonna get wet,” Pinky says, sidestepping.

  “We have explained this to him,” Hofstedler says. “But he is young and foolish.”

  “Gee, thanks, Leon.” Rafferty says, pulling the hat on. “I haven’t been feeling very young lately.”

  “In here,” Hofstedler says, “you are a child. Ein Kind. This is the Cave of the Ancients.” He holds up a hand, as though in benediction. “Miaow’s play. We all go, yes?”

  2

  Like an Ice Cap

  After the air-conditioning in the Expat Bar, set for the internal thermostats of people from Varney’s cold countries, the rain feels like a hot shower.

  Rafferty zigzags his way across the packed sidewalk, holding his breath against intermittent clouds of tobacco smoke. He inserts himself into the slow-moving snarl of pedestrians, almost all men, who are doggedly working their way up Patpong and then crossing over to the other side and going back down again. For people who have traveled thousands of miles to do precisely this, they don’t seem to be having a very good time. They’re mostly drunk, and grimly drunk at that. Some of them are walking as though they learned the skill on a planet with much weaker gravity and they can’t get used to how much their feet weigh. They’ve stopped in multiple bars without choosing a temporary companion among the five or six hundred young women who are dancing there, which means that either they’re just browsers or, Rafferty thinks—with a nod of acknowledgment to Joni Mitchell—

  they’re discovering the craziness that comes with too much choice. Voices are cranked up, gestures border on the operatic, faces are red. The ripe, nose-assaulting smell of spilled beer, half yeast and half piss, fights for dominance with the cigarette smoke and the body odor that’s so often a by-product of the interaction between Caucasian armpits and the all-enveloping heat of the tropics.

  The rain is a type that’s found, in Rafferty’s experience, only in Thailand. It combines two kinds of rain at the same time: big, sloppy, splatting drops slanting down through a misty drizzle that hangs halos around the bright lights dangling above the booths of the Patpong Night Market. The Chinese-made junk on sale is roofed against the weather by sheets of blue plastic, some of which have probably been hanging here for decades.

  He feels a faint shadow of the thrill that used to come over him when Thailand was new to him, every time he remembered where he was: in the tropics. The distance he had traveled from the sun-scraped desert of Lancaster, California, to the steaming excess of Thailand—an overstuffed tangle of plant and animal life with this teeming city at its core—never presented itself to him as a matter of miles or kilometers. It seemed to him not so much a journey as a rebirth. And, he thinks, the men in the Expat Bar probably once saw it the same way, before it turned into the place where they simply grew old, the place that witnessed the indignity of their infirmities: their swelling guts, their limps, their spotted baldness, their forgetfulness.

  To the extent that Rafferty actually paid attention to Arthur Varney’s soliloquy, it sounded both accurate and dishonest, with the mix achieving an almost political level. It was accurate in that the hot countries have been ravaged for centuries, dishonest in that Varney omitted colder places like North America and the northern regions of Japan, where the native populations had been subdued and either wiped out or marginalized by relative latecomers. So what Varney says is true of the tropics, but there’s no geographic monopoly on exploitation.

  It’s an undependable argument made by a man who, at first glance, struck Rafferty as undependable to the marrow of his bones.

  And why, he wonders, is Varney interested in him?

  If he is. And even if he actually is, it’s probably no cause for alarm. If the man’s best shot at finding Rafferty was claiming a stool in the Expat Bar, how formidable can he be? If it weren’t for Miaow and Rose’s marathon of British programs on their new flat-screen, purchased the night he learned Rose was pregnant, Rafferty wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the place. Until a few nights ago, he hadn’t been there more than two nights in a row for years.

  Still, he does a quick mental fact-check. No one in the bar actually knows where he lives.

  When he first came to Bangkok, the Expat Bar had appalled him in a limited way—in a way that felt like it might be interesting in a book. Crowded into that little room was a tiny, tightly focused society, a sort of antimeritocracy, made up of resolutely, even defiantly flawed men who had abandoned their homes, their work, and their families so they could drown themselves in the cut-rate flesh of Patpong. At the time they must have felt like they were buying a ticket to an earthly version of the jihadists’ h
eaven, an endless supply of renewable, or at least plausible, virgins for the rest of their lives. But Rafferty has come to believe that time is essentially a slow-motion joke, and in this case it’s a dilly: the street’s bars have deteriorated; the bar fines and the bar workers’ “tips” have gone up as the men’s incomes dwindled, a dynamic that Campeau bewails endlessly; and the men themselves have grown old and vast-waisted. Women who work in bars, like women who work pretty much anywhere, generally prefer young, slender men to old, fat ones, especially old, fat ones who are running out of money. These days the Expat Bar’s patrons grouse endlessly about the way the “girls” have changed, without ever looking at themselves.

  And they’re dying.

  It hasn’t struck him until now how much that bleak, single-minded little world has shrunk. It’s melted away like an ice cap. At least eight of the twenty-five or so men he’d met when he arrived in Bangkok eight years ago have passed away, thousands of miles from home, creating awkward problems for their embassies and prompting imprecise but deeply felt memorial ceremonies in the bar: approximately Jewish, approximately Catholic, approximately Buddhist. Nine months ago, it had almost been Hofstedler’s turn. He’d gone down like a tree, slammed to the pavement by cardiac arrest, outside the Queen’s Corner bar. He survived only because four bar girls, with a lot of profanity and perspiration and a great many soprano grunts, had hauled the big man up to Surawong Road and jammed him into a cab, and four of them had hopped in and directed the driver to the nearest hospital. They’d told the hospital staff extravagant lies about how the fat farang, whose name they didn’t even know, was a millionaire. Hours later, when he opened his eyes beneath the harsh fluorescents of the recovery room, Hofstedler had experienced a long moment of very complicated gratitude as he realized that his beautiful rescuers were actually a quartet of thickly made-up ladyboys. They’d saved his life, they’d created a prolonged and highly dramatic scene until the doctors, in self-defense, examined him and immediately opened him up and put in a stent, and they’d waited for hours, their moneymaking hours, to make sure this perfect stranger had come through, and they were ladyboys. It was their hospital; it specialized in breast embellishments and male-to-female metamorphoses.

  Hofstedler had always loathed ladyboys.

  Somebody bumps Rafferty from behind, and he automatically checks his hip pocket, which still has a wallet in it. Six or seven years ago, one of the guys in the bar, an Italian named Enrico, had slapped his pocket exactly as Rafferty had, and when he got home, he discovered a cheap plastic “Hello Kitty” wallet stuffed with currency-size pornographic manga, which he’d brought into the bar and shown around to warn the other guys to be on guard. So Rafferty removes his wallet, glances at it, and shoves it down into a front pocket, since those are harder to pick.

  Enrico, he thinks. He’d practically lived in the bar, and he had loved classical music with Italianate fervor. And he’d died a year or two back. So that’s another one gone. Make it nine. Age had had its way with the bar’s patrons in other ways, too. Buster Fielding, one of the men Rafferty met all those years ago, has been hospitalized with dementia, and another, a Vietnam veteran named Wallace Palmer, has grown vague and intangible. Being with Wallace these days is like sitting next to a shadow. Sometimes he knows who Poke is, sometimes he mistakes Poke for someone he knew in 1969. Leon, Pinky Holland, and the Growing Younger Man take turns checking on Wallace every night, making sure he’s found his way home from wherever he goes, taking him food, hauling him into the bar occasionally for an evening among the living. After the last drink, one of them will escort him home, because otherwise he’ll direct a tuk-tuk or a motorcycle taxi to an apartment over a shop front that was demolished twenty-five years ago. Hofstedler has slipped a card with his name and phone number on it into Wallace’s wallet for the police, when they find Wallace lost and he can’t tell them where he needs to go. Wallace had been tall and still physically vigorous when Rafferty met him, with a face like a Greek ruin—destruction failing to mask flawless structure—and he’d been the first of the men in the bar to befriend Poke. Rafferty had been wandering the city with his mouth hanging open, trying to cope with the sensory overload and find a center for his book. Wallace had helped him get an apartment, taught him how to cross streets without getting killed. He’d moved Rafferty to the stool next to his at the Expat Bar, brought him into the conversations, and ushered him into the small and fiercely defended circle of Hofstedler’s goodwill. Once Rafferty was okay with Hofstedler, he was okay with everyone except Campeau, who liked no one on earth but the bar girl of the moment. These days Campeau doesn’t even have one of those to soften his heart.

  The Expat Bar had been one of Rafferty’s keys to the city. Out of what he heard there, he had written tens of thousands of words for his book, had begun to construct a lattice of understanding about how the sex trade and, beyond that, the city itself worked. Without the bar, without Wallace, he would have had no way of understanding who Rose really was the night he first saw her dancing at the King’s Castle bar. Without Rose he never could have adopted Miaow. Together, Rose and Miaow form the center of Rafferty’s life, and without the Expat Bar he wouldn’t have either of them. And especially, he thinks, without Wallace.

  Who hasn’t been around these past few nights. He should go see Wallace.

  Rafferty is most of the way to the point where Patpong ends in a T-junction with Silom, lost in thought and letting the crowd carry him along, when he hears a bottle hit the ground, followed by a shout and a long string of profanity. He turns to see a beefy, balding guy in what Rafferty thinks of as the Aussie beach uniform—knee-length shorts and a wet, once-white, wifebeater now stained with God only knows what—backing through a puddle of beer until he bumps against a market stand, endangering a glinting array of fraudulent designer wristwatches, as a much smaller Thai woman in her mid-twenties raises a hand glittering with cheap rings to slap the cheek the man is already rubbing. The woman leaps across the distance between herself and the retreating man so quickly that Rafferty hardly sees her move; once there she plants a knee in the center of the Aussie’s shorts. The man bellows like a water buffalo, and the crowd parts to allow two more men in similar outfits to emerge. They charge the girl as their friend sinks to his knees, pulling with him the cloth that has the watches on it. The girl backs up quickly and wheels around to fade into the crowd. Short as she is, she’ll be invisible once she insinuates herself into it.

  Before she does, for just an instant, her eyes meet Rafferty’s and widen when she sees him looking straight at her. She’s gone in a blink, but it’s obvious to him that she’d known he was there, known exactly where he was. Had, in fact, confirmed his location. With two furious drunks in wifebeaters about to grab her, she had taken the time to check him out.

  A plausible explanation: she was following him when she tangled with the Aussie. And as she fled from his friends, she remembered Rafferty and confirmed that she hadn’t lost him.

  Scanning the crowd for her, he thinks, First Varney and now this woman. Putting together his impressions of her, he realizes she was probably a bar girl dressed for the street. Long, looping curls hanging down like gift-wrap ribbon, rouge as bright as bougainvillea, a tight red dress from the Tart Shop or wherever the women in the trade buy their street clothes. Something odd about her face, visible even through the thick impasto of stage makeup: a smudge of some kind to the left of her mouth. A port-wine birthmark, maybe. No one has been interested in Rafferty for months, and suddenly there’s this pair.

  But right now he’s not interested in being interesting. Rose and Miaow are at home, and Rose has their child taking shape within her. Treasure, the third female in his life—at least in the sense that he feels responsible for her—is safe and in good hands, for now. He’s reconnected with Arthit, his best friend in Bangkok, and he’s even forging a relationship with Anna, the woman who almost drove them apart and with whom Arthit is living and whom he
might even marry.

  And in the apartment, Rose and Miaow’s Brit parade will finally be over. The television will be off.

  He’s about to cross the street at Silom to walk home when he feels, or thinks he feels, eyes on his back. He turns and scans the crowd, reflecting on all he has to protect at this time in his life. Even though he sees no one who is obviously watching him, he steps off the curb and flags a taxi. If he takes an indirect route, looking out the back window the whole way, he’ll be able to get home knowing that no one was behind him.

  Not that anyone would actually be behind him, of course.

  3

  The Bamboo Telegraph

  The prevailing color is the fraudulent, slightly chemical purple that jelly makers have chosen to represent grapes, but the hue has faded. In fact, it’s had time to fade so much that he asks himself why he never noticed the prints before, when they were fresher.

  There are half a dozen purple ghosts, slowly disappearing into the general grime of the elevator: quite clearly handprints, and in defiance of reasonable expectations when one is confronted by grape-jelly handprints, the hands are adult size and too high for children. Two distinct sets, perhaps a man and a woman, who got into this elevator after, apparently, eating grape jelly with their bare hands. The sight of the prints is so dismaying that he checks for other signs of decline as the elevator climbs toward his floor.

  They’re everywhere: a sticky sheen of finger dirt around the buttons; a name in Thai, “Kaew,” chiseled into the cheap wood above the control panel; a cobweb draped like an elf’s cape over one of the fluorescents; chipped corners on the square black-and-white floor tiles. Mottling the white tiles are spills that might be coffee and red wine. Ancient cigarettes have left their vile wisp in the air. How could he not have noticed all this—this decay—before? His family lives here.

  Ever since Rose realized she was pregnant, they’ve been talking about getting a bigger apartment. Rafferty, who had traveled his entire adult life looking for a home, had dug in his heels: he was here now and happy about it, and he wasn’t moving. Rose had put his hand on her still-flat belly and walked through his resistance as if it had been a patch of sunlight, and now they both take it for granted that a move is in the future, although Rafferty has been assuming that they’d just choose a different unit in this building, where they’ve lived together as a family. But as the doors slide open, he’s made a decision. You don’t bring a clean baby into a dirty building.